Jay Emerson and Michael Kane; Yale University - Department of Statistics, will go through the basics of R's package system, and will demonstrate the process of creating, checking, and building a simple package.

The talk will touch upon the use of S3 and S4 (if you don't know about them, don't worry about it) and the inclusion of C/C++ code (if you're not into C/C++, don't worry about it). As time permits, the presenters may introduce a range of additional topics, such as (a) the difference between .C() and .Call(), (b) our approach to handling massive matrices (potentially exceeding available RAM, and potentially shared across R processes), or (c) very elegant tools for parallel computing (package "foreach" by Steve Weston). Each of these latter topics relate to package design in interesting ways.

Note: given the success of the pre-meetup networking at the February meetup, we will again have some coffee and snacks starting at 6:15pm, and the talks will begin promptly at 7pm. As before, we are asking for a donation of $5.00 from each member to cover the cost of catering. You may make your donation now using PayPal, or in cash at the meetup.